Should frontier wars be commemorated in the War Memorial?

Will Longstaff's thoroughly spooky and fabulous Menin Gate at Midnight. If you haven't seen it in the AWM, go now, right now!

A very balanced and interesting article on the subject, even if it could have been improved IMO if it had been pruned back by 20% or so in length.

THE AWM is the behemoth of Australian public history, on a quite different plane from Hyde Park or any number of parks, memorials, local museums and the like. From its initial focus on the sacrifices of Australian forces during the first world war the AWM has expanded to take in the experience of other combatants and of civilians in wars and war-like operations in which Australians have been on active service, including peace-keeping. . . . . It is at once a research institute, a publisher, a museum, a memorial and a place of commemoration. It makes corporeal our loss, sacrifice and valour in war and is therefore central to the central component of our national identity. It is a sacred place. To propose, therefore, as many historians have done, that it should include in its embrace the wars of the frontier is to run risks up to and including the charge of sacrilege.

That proposal was first made in 1979 when a distinguished historian engaged by the AWM as a consultant suggested that it should include irregular warfare such as the Eureka Stockade, the Vietnam War (not then included in the AWM) and the frontier wars. Despite the historians conservative credentials (it was none other than Geoffrey Blainey) and his appeal to comparability, nothing happened. The idea was raised again from time to time, typically by academic historians, and most notably a decade ago two decades after Blaineys initiative by Professor Ken Inglis in the course of his remarks at the 1998 launch of his Sacred Places, an exhaustive and highly respectful study of our war memorials. Such an authority could hardly go unanswered. The AWMs director (retired Major General) Steve Gower commissioned a report from his Military History Section, which came up with the congenial conclusion that only police forces or British military units were involved in the wars, whereas the Memorials charter calls upon it to commemorate Australias military forces. This view the Council promptly endorsed.

Behind the scenes, however, disagreement simmered, with the AWMs director on one side, its principal historian, Dr Peter Stanley, on the other. Eventually the disagreement turned into a public spat, unimportant in its detail but revealing in its tone. . . .